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Days after former Acting Attorney General Sally Yates confirmed the classified nature of months-old calls between Mike Flynn and Russian Ambassador Sergei Kislyak, the House Ethics Committee has remained silent on whether it will look into complaints against Democratic members who discussed the substance of those classified calls publicly. The committee's avoidance of the allegations against Democratic Reps. Adam Schiff and Jackie Speier, both members of the House Intelligence Committee, comes after it swiftly took up complaints against the Republican chairman of the Intelligence Committee, Rep. Devin Nunes, over a similar charge.

The NSA intentionally and routinely intercepted communications of American citizens in violation of the Constitution. During the Obama years, the National Security Agency intentionally and routinely intercepted and reviewed communications of American citizens in violation of the Constitution and of court-ordered guidelines implemented pursuant to federal law. The unlawful surveillance appears to have been a massive abuse of the government’s foreign-intelligence-collection authority, carried out for the purpose of monitoring the communications of Americans in the United States. While aware that it was going on for an extensive period of time, the administration failed to disclose its unlawful surveillance of Americans...

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Chinese government "systematically dismantled" CIA spying operations in China starting in late 2010 and killed or imprisoned at least a dozen CIA sources over the next two years, The New York Times reported Saturday. The newspaper cited 10 current and former U.S. officials, who described the intelligence breach as one of the worst in decades. They spoke on condition of anonymity. The report said U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agencies scrambled to stem the damage, but were bitterly divided over the cause of the breach. Some investigators were convinced there was a mole within the CIA,...

WASHINGTON — The Chinese government “systematically dismantled” CIA spying operations in China starting in late 2010 and killed or imprisoned at least a dozen CIA sources over the next two years, The New York Times reported Saturday. The newspaper cited 10 current and former U.S. officials, who described the intelligence breach as one of the worst in decades. They spoke on condition of anonymity. The report said U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agencies scrambled to stem the damage, but were bitterly divided over the cause of the breach. Some investigators were convinced there was a mole within the CIA, while...

The Chinese government systematically dismantled C.I.A. spying operations in the country starting in 2010, killing or imprisoning more than a dozen sources over two years and crippling intelligence gathering there for years afterward. Current and former American officials described the intelligence breach as one of the worst in decades. It set off a scramble in Washington’s intelligence and law enforcement agencies to contain the fallout, but investigators were bitterly divided over the cause. Some were convinced that a mole within the C.I.A. had betrayed the United States. Others believed that the Chinese had hacked the covert system the C.I.A. used...

In the competition for marquee commencement speakers, the University of California, San Diego thought it had scored a coup this year — a Nobel Peace Prize winner, best-selling author and spiritual North Star to millions of people. “We are honored to host His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama,” gushed Pradeep Khosla, the university’s chancellor, “and thankful that he will share messages of global compassion.” Within hours of Mr. Khosla’s announcement, though, the university was blindsided by nasty remarks on Facebook and other social media sites: “Imagine how Americans would feel if someone invited Bin Laden,” said one. At the center...

Candace Marie Claiborne, a 60-year-old employee of the U.S. Department of State, was charged Wednesday with obstructing an official proceeding and making false statements to the FBI -- both felony offenses -- for allegedly concealing numerous contacts that she had over a period of years with Chinese intelligence agents, the Justice Department said Wednesday. The veteran State Department employee, who appeared before a judge Wednesday, is also accused of failing to report gifts she received from Chinese contacts. Claiborne allegedly failed to report repeated contacts with two intelligence agents of the People’s Republic of China, and the agents provided tens...

A State Department employee pleaded not guilty in court on Wednesday after being charged in an FBI investigation, the Department of Justice announced. Candace Claiborne, who worked in the Caucasus Affairs office of the State Department, is being charged for two felony offenses. Claiborne is being charged with “obstructing an official proceeding and making false statements to the FBI, both felony offenses, for allegedly concealing numerous contacts that she had over a period of years with foreign intelligence agents,” a Department of Justice release said. Claiborne, who has a Top Secret security clearance, failed to disclose her foreign contacts abroad...

Yesterday we reported that an international group of hackers claim they have breached Apple’s iCloud user database and stolen 300 million usernames and passwords. The group has threatened to initiate a widespread factory reset on April 7th, 2017, potentially wiping out data on tens of millions of iPhones and iCloud accounts should Apple fail to pay a ransom. But that breach by nefarious hackers, while serious, is nothing compared to what your trusted operating system provider may be doing on your personal computer. According to a recent report, if you are a Windows 10 user then every single keystroke you...

A Potomac, Md., Islamic center maintains links to Iran despite its claims that it is independent of a foundation that is being sued by the U.S. government on charges of funneling money to the Islamic republic. Ali Mohammadi, the current manager of the Islamic Education Center (IEC) of Maryland, told The Washington Times that the center's only relationship to the Alavi Foundation is that of tenant to landlord. He quoted a spokesman for the U.S. attorney's office as saying that forfeiture proceedings initiated earlier this month against the foundation - which also owns property in New York and other states...

The more the scandals left by Obama are unraveling the more I am conflicted between anger and fear over what is in our future. It is bad enough (and not completely unexpected) to learn that Obama has been working harder to destroy our country that we thought. But, the depth of his support in the media is in my opinion, in need of far more exposure and very serious punishment.

INCOMING U.S. Spies Live in Fear of Trump’s Next Tweet Washington’s national security professionals are bracing for the president’s next Twitter storm, and frantically subscribing to @realDonaldTrump alerts so they can manage the fallout from his latest rage tweets. Kimberly Dozier Kimberly Dozier 03.10.17 12:13 ET As Friday evening draws to a close around Washington, D.C., the city’s tight-knit and secretive national security clan goes to sleep with a new unease. It’s not Syria or Iran or even North Korea they’re most worried about. They’re uncertain just what President Donald Trump may tweet in the wee hours before they wake,...

A leading Democratic fundraiser and close political ally of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton may have been a target of the alleged ring of Russian spies arrested yesterday by federal authorities. The president of the high-end tax accounting and financial advising firm Morea Financial Services confirmed earlier today that the alleged spy "Cynthia Murphy" was a longtime employee and a vice president at the company, which is located on lower Broadway in Manhattan. Federal and state campaign finance filings suggest that the little-known company manages the finances of one of New York's top Democratic financiers: Alan Patricof, a venture capital...

Obama in the city for Clinton ally’s fundraiser By Emily Smith President Obama is coming to Manhattan Tuesday for yet another fund-raiser, hosted by longtime Hillary Clinton friend and bundler Alan Patricof. While the president is flying in on Air Force One for the intimate “fireside chat” at Patricof’s home in front of just 26 people at the $32,400 per ticket event, private equity and venture capital pioneer Patricof has made it clear the fund-raiser is not to bolster Obama, but to boost the Democratic National Committee ahead of a possible Clinton presidential run.

Earlier this week, in an appearance on Fox News, Trump confirmed his beliefs that Obama is behind the litany of leaks that have plagued his administration over the past couple of months. "No, I think he [Obama] is behind it, because his people are certainly behind it. I also think it is politics, that's the way it is." And while the source of the leaks may be easy to deduce, the appropriate response is not so easy to implement. That said, there is a growing chorus of advisers to the President who are urging him to purge the government of...

Jack Barsky died in September 1955, at the age of 10, and was buried in the Mount Lebanon Cemetery in the suburbs of Washington DC. His name is on the passport of the man sitting before me now - a youthful 67-year-old East German, born Albert Dittrich. The passport is not a fake. Albert Dittrich is Jack Barsky in the eyes of the US government. The story of how this came to be is, by Barsky's own admission, "implausible" and "ridiculous", even by the standards of Cold War espionage. But as he explains in a new memoir, Deep Undercover, it...

What goes with fast cars and lifestyles of the rich and famous? Apparently working in Information Technology for the House of Representatives! Remember Hillary Clinton’s IT guy? That dude got PAID! And he kept his mouth shut, and avoided prison…so far. We have another situation brewing with the Democrats, and we documented it recently. One family, three brothers and a wife, are the center of a criminal probe into their use of congressional information technology systems. Last week many Democratic lawmakers who employed the four learned they may have been a party to criminal activity. The foursome may have been...

President Trump has defeated Democrats in the intelligence community (IC) who were leaking classified information to the press. Such leaks have been a problem for many presidents, but Trump is the first who took a proactive approach and set up a sting operation that identified the leakers. It’s highly illegal to leak classified information. It’s also illegal to PUBLISH this information, but Trump is too smart to try and prosecute reporters. I thought that Trump would fire members of the IC until the leaks stopped, but the president solved the problem with a much more imaginative and deadly approach: He...

In 1977, Carl Bernstein published an exposé of a CIA program known as Operation Mockingbird, a covert program involving, according to Bernstein, “more than 400 American journalists who in the past 25 years have secretly carried out assignments for the Central Intelligence Agency.” Bernstein found that in “many instances” CIA documents revealed that “journalists were engaged to perform tasks for the CIA with the consent of the managements of America’s leading news organizations.” Fast-forward to December 2016, and one can see that there isn’t much need for a covert government program these days.

The United States is much better off without Michael Flynn serving as national security adviser. But no one should be cheering the way he was brought down. The whole episode is evidence of the precipitous and ongoing collapse of America's democratic institutions — not a sign of their resiliency. Flynn's ouster was a soft coup (or political assassination) engineered by anonymous intelligence community bureaucrats. The results might be salutary, but this isn't the way a liberal democracy is supposed to function. Unelected intelligence analysts work for the president, not the other way around. Far too many Trump critics appear not...